The increased growth of the software industry has made a large variety of applications available to the public, and the public has learned to rely heavily upon these applications. Furthermore, it is common for businesses to employ multiple applications within their companies for day-to-day activities. Because these applications are provided by various vendors, coordination to support routine business operations becomes a daunting task often requiring manual labor provided by resources that could be used elsewhere. Thus, it is important for businesses to enable their applications to communicate and share information in an efficient and secure manner.
While businesses need the ability to integrate their applications to coordinate and share information, business also want to minimize the costs in performing such integration. One common problem with conventional approaches is that business are forced to purchase custom message queues that are expensive and difficult to integrate into their existing systems. As the business changes, these custom queues must be replaced or updated costing even more time and expense.
An additional problem with conventional approaches is that system managers are faced with the burdensome task of attempting to manage a variety of data store components. Messages are difficult to track both during normal communication processes as well as during times of system failure.
An additional problem with conventional approaches is that they permit duplicate processing of messages. In some applications, it is imperative that a message is processed only once. For example, a financial application should only debit a user's account once for each transaction. Duplicate processing of messages results in inaccurate information and requires vast amounts of resources to restore data to its proper state.
A further problem with conventional approaches is that the queues are often overworked causing bottlenecks within the system.